School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from growth percentile...

This paper provides an overview of control function (CF) methods for solving the problem of endogenous explanatory variables (EEVs) in linear and nonlinear models. CF methods often can be justified in situations where “plug-in†approaches are known to produce inconsistent estimators of...

When estimating population descriptive statistics, weighting is called for if needed to make the analysis sample representative of the target population. With regard to research directed instead at estimating causal effects, we discuss three distinct weighting motives: (1) to achieve precise...

We consider estimating binary response models on an unbalanced panel, where the outcome of the dependent variable may be missing due to non-random selection, or there is self selection into a treatment. In the present paper, we first consider estimation of sample selection models and treatment...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

Empirical Bayes’s (EB) estimation has become a popular procedure used to calculate teacher value added, often as a way to make imprecise estimates more reliable. In this article, we review the theory of EB estimation and use simulated and real student achievement data to study the ability...

I describe how the method of moments approach to estimation, including the more recent generalized method of moments (GMM) theory, can be applied to problems using cross section, time series, and panel data. Method of moments estimators can be attractive because in many circumstances they are...

I study a simple, widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic, nonlinear unobserved effects models. Rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables, I propose finding the distribution conditional on the...